Political Quotes

“At the end of last week, I was able to take to the floor with some of my colleagues to talk about high-level nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain. Part of that time, I wanted to make sure, as I have each week, to highlight certain locations around this country where high-level nuclear waste is stored. Because of time constraints, I wasn't able to do that, so I take to the floor this morning to highlight a nuclear power plant in Florida called Turkey Point. And the way I do this, Mr. Speaker, is I have this poster in front of me, and I compare the location of high-level nuclear waste at Turkey Point to the defined-by-law location for a single repository in this country, Yucca Mountain. So look at what we have here. At Yucca Mountain, we have currently no nuclear waste on site. At Turkey Point, there's is 1,074 metric tons of spent fuel on site. That's quite a lot of fuel. If we had waste stored at Yucca Mountain, the waste would be stored 1,000 feet underground-- Yucca Mountain is a mountain. At Turkey Point, waste is stored above ground in pools. Now why is that an important point to consider? The nuclear catastrophe in Japan, the Fukushima Daiichi plant, part of the major disaster was because of high-level nuclear waste stored in pools.…”